


one day robots will cry

by tempalays



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Character Study, Except there's no comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied onesided stevebucky, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), bucky deserves better, just hurt, steves's endgame arc was BAD and i am SAD about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 11:04:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18737749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tempalays/pseuds/tempalays
Summary: He never asked though. He never asked Bucky if he’d be alright on his own, never asked if he’d be able to get through it. Steve just said goodbye to him andleft. He left to get the happy ending he deserves, to get the life he deserves and the woman he’d never stopped loving and Buckyknows. He knows he doesn’t deserve a happy ending, he’s done too much already, ruined too many lives and snuffed out too many more, taken too many endings from the lives others for him to deserve one of his own. Bucky knows that and he’s okay with it, he made peace with it years ago back in Bucharest once he gave up on trying to know himself, but he can’t help but be angry at how cruel the universe is for giving him this fate.-Bucky watches Steve leave and come back for the final time, watches him give the shield to Sam, and realises that maybe there was never anything to hold on to in the first place.





	one day robots will cry

**Author's Note:**

> ok well i'm back and its been a DAY. endgame really made me mad, the way that the russos spent eight years building up this stevebucky friendship that had really high stakes for both of them only to literally throw it in the trash along with the characters of half the other avengers. bucky deserves better but also i'm really lacking closure because he was in the film for like maybe two minutes and i need to know his feelings, hence this short study lol. also maybe im funnelling my anger out ? who knows.

Steve leaves him. 

 

He leaves Bucky for good this time, goes back in time to live the life he deserved with the woman he loved and comes back as a goddamn geriatric, and somehow with Steve right in front of him Bucky feels lonelier and more lost than he has in years.

 

Back when he was the Soldier, he didn’t even know what loneliness was, programmed to take missions, execute missions, complete missions, give mission reports and then go back under ice until they required his skills again. Bucky laughs whenever they get referred to as  _ ‘skills’.  _ People never knew how to approach him after Wakanda, calling his assets  _ ‘skills’  _ when they needed him, as if his ability to never miss a mark wasn’t built and beaten into him, painstakingly and with the precision of a dollmaker. James Buchanan Barnes was devised, built, and converted into a machine to fit the specifications required to make something able to kidnap, torture and murder consistently and without ever losing its calibration, all humanity systematically removed and replaced with whatever was deemed a necessary alternative, and there is not a day where Bucky doesn’t look in the mirror without reminding himself that he’s still a monster, even if they can’t get him anymore.

 

He was alone for months on end, sometimes years, the only people he spoke to being people who had things he needed. The Soldier didn’t even speak to the people he killed, taking them out with a gunshot a few hundred meters away, or getting close enough that they were dead before they could realise that they were the next target on the list. 

 

But once he found Steve in DC and Bucky knew that he  _ knew him once, _ he somehow had to find the pieces of himself that were left after decades of disrepair to figure out who he  _ was _ . You can’t be lonely when every day you’re expecting to die, but they did such a good job when they made Bucky that they never did find him. That or they didn’t bother looking in the first place. 

 

He was lost, but he wasn’t lonely. 

 

And then they get him in Bucharest, or, Steve gets him first. Tells him that he’s been framed for an act of terrorism and they’ve got orders to kill him on sight.  _ That’s a good idea.  _ Bucky’s ready for it to all end anyway, and he can’t do it himself- they programmed that out of him too. He’s spent months in Bucharest in this dingy apartment, hiding his arm and hiding himself, the walls covered in newspaper clippings of him and clippings of Steve. There’s notebooks littered across the place, some of them on the floor by dents in the walls from where Bucky’s tried to map out his life, or at least map out the moments he can recall and hit a roadblock because  _ I don’t know who I am WHO AM I,  _ and his fist has collided with the wall, plaster turning into dust and crumbling onto the floor while the old  _ bunicuță  _ the next room over thumps on the wall to tell him to be quiet. 

 

He wishes they had got him that night in Bucharest, he’d rather be neutralised by them than he would by a Hydra sleeper cell that kicking around, but he pushes Steve out and gets away and those handcrafted instincts that he was given all those years ago start to take over his body and his mind, truly, for the first time in years, and he has to stop himself from killing every single one of them because he knows that Steve believes in him, and he refuses to forget that this time. 

 

During those few weeks he refuses to forget that Steve believes in him, but Bucky thinks deep down that he’d be on that list of people trying to put him down if he knew how good, how  _ normal _ it felt to Bucky to be the Winter Soldier again, or at least an iteration of it. 

 

But now he’s alone again. He found Steve, then he lost him, then he found him and lost him all over again, and every single time Bucky was a different version of himself, each time becoming more and more like a normal human being again. Except the only good thing about losing Steve all those times is that if he never came back then Bucky could deal with it.  _ I don’t deserve him so I don’t get to miss him  _ and Bucky could willingly go down that route until he died a lonely death, in a world that wasn’t his and in a grave that could go to someone who deserved it.

 

Somehow though, this is worse. Steve told him, he had the decency to do that at least. He told him that he was gonna stay in New York, life his life out with that Peggy dame that he was always in love with and then come back, but just older. Much older. He never gave a specific age, but Bucky figured it’d be until Peggy died and he knew that woman wasn’t going to kick the bucket early, so when Steve comes back as an eighty year old, Bucky wasn’t surprised.

 

He never asked though. He never asked Bucky if he’d be alright on his own, never asked if he’d be able to get through it. Steve just said goodbye to him and  _ left.  _ He left to get the happy ending he deserved, to get the life he deserved and the woman he’d never stopped loving and Bucky  _ knows.  _ He knows he doesn’t deserve a happy ending, he’s done too much already, ruined too many lives and snuffed out too many more, taken too many endings from the lives others for him to deserve one of his own. Bucky knows that and he’s okay with it, he made peace with it years ago back in Bucharest once he gave up on trying to know himself, but he can’t help but be angry at how cruel the universe is for giving him this fate. 

 

When Steve got out the ice he knew he was a man out of time, had no idea Bucky was still alive and kicking; brainwashed and hijacked but, alive nonetheless. He went years trying to accept his fate (but clearly he never did), but when he realised that the man on the bridge was Bucky, suddenly all of that changed. He got some hope in his life because all of a sudden he’s not longer the oldest youngest man alive, because the other one of him is his  _ best friend.  _ Steve gets a reason to live, a reason to find hope, and a reason to motivate himself every day. 

 

Bucky doesn’t get that. He doesn’t get hope, because Steve is twenty yards ahead of him but fifty years older, and it doesn’t matter how much Steve tells him that it’s alright and that  _ It’s still me, Buck _ _ ,  _ it’s just not. He’s not Bucky’s Steve, he’s another fucking universe’s, or timelines’ or dimension’s or whatever entity, but he sure as hell isn’t Bucky’s. Not anymore, and maybe he never was in the first place.

 

They were supposed to live out their lives together. Bucky got fixed in Wakanda, got all the remnants of Hydra left in his mind taken out so they he could piece himself together into his own person again and he did it for  _ Steve.  _ He had no reason to do it for himself, he hadn’t cared about whether he lived or died since he fell off that train and if it wasn’t for Steve giving him a reason to start again then he could have just gotten someone else to kill him, even if he couldn’t do it himself.

 

He was meant to grow old with Steve. They were supposed to laugh at all this new age technology and Steve was meant to help him adjust, teach him how the world works and explain it to him in a way Bucky would understand. They were going to live in Brooklyn, and Bucky was going to do something with his life, maybe doing this Avenging malarkey with Steve until their bodies decide to give out and they get to go into their glory days only a hundred years too late, or try and fix at least some of the shit he knew he did in the past, disabling weapons and finding items he’d had missions to dispose of that he knew would be a threat if anyone found them now.

 

Maybe Bucky would even go back to school, he didn’t even realise how much that had changed since he was a kid. He dropped out when he was seventeen (he made Steve stay in school though) because he knew it wasn’t for him, but now there’s so much shit he doesn’t know. The chunks of history that he does know, he’s only aware of because they happened because of  _ him.  _ They kept him away from newspapers when they had him, but once Bucky became free to do what he wanted he found himself searching through news archives of the years that he remembered, the numbers that stuck out to him in amongst the fog of his brain, trying to piece together some sort of timeline that made sense. 

 

He feels stupid talking too that Peter kid, feels even more like a dumbass when he doesn’t understand how basic technology works, basic pop culture references, the list goes on and on, and he doesn’t even have a high school diploma either, even if it would have been from the forties. He figures he’d learn anyway, use a computer and find an online course for himself to get him up to speed.  

 

He wanted to travel the world, take Steve to France, and Russia, and Japan, and re-do Germany and surprise him with his fluency (even though he knew Steve spoke French.). There’s so much he wanted to do with the new life he’d been given, but having Steve there was a prerequisite. It doesn’t matter what Bucky wanted to do because if he didn’t finally have Steve by his side while he did it, he didn’t care. And now he doesn’t.

  
  


Steve’s old. He’s got grey hair, aches in his joints that run into his bones, wrinkles around his eyes that signify a life well lived and Bucky can’t stay here anymore. He doesn’t care about Steve apologising for leaving him, because even if he chose not to save Bucky in the present, he could have done it in the past, but he knows Steve didn’t. He knows that Steve went back in time to live the life he always wanted to, and with the knowledge that every single day he was living that life that his best friend was being tortured and rewritten and being sent out to murder innocent people in cold blood, broken in and beaten every single goddamn day. And what kills Bucky the most, what wraps around his heart, his lungs, his throat and then around his tongue is that it was Steve who found him. Steve who watched the terror in Bucky’s eyes in Washington as his past and present collided, the fear of not understanding what was happening, what was going on, who Steve even  _ was  _ in his eyes as they stared at each other, Bucky’s finger over the trigger _.  _ They both knew that Bucky recognised Steve while he was trying to kill him, and it was then that Steve murmured a quiet  _ ‘What did they do to you, Buck’  _ while he tried to appeal to what little was left of Bucky’s humanity. And it was that Steve knew that his humanity, the last dregs left of James Buchanan Barnes, were rooted in  _ him.  _

 

And yet he still didn’t save him, even when he had the chance to do everything over.

 

So Bucky leaves. Steve’s sitting by the water and talking to Sam, and Bucky watches him hand over the shield to him and that’s the last dagger that Steve Rogers twists into his chest. Bucky doesn’t deserve to be Captain America, he doesn’t deserve to be associated with someone who had always been so  _ good _ , and he knows that Sam deserves it more than anyone else ever could. Sam who pulled Steve up those years ago, Sam who gave Bucky a chance even though he knew his history, Sam who was reliable and kind and didn’t need to be sent to another  _ GODDAMN COUNTRY JUST TO BECOME A NORMAL PERSON _ but watching Steve give that shield to him in plain sight, the one Bucky too, had fought with so many iterations of, both of them knowing that he was onlooking just a few meters behind was too much. Steve took everything away from Bucky, and gave the last parts of himself to Sam and did it right in front of him nonetheless. 

 

Steve’s got a good few years left in him, he’s not going anywhere yet, so Bucky turns on his heel and leaves. He walks past Scott, who’s watching the scene go down from the side and he doesn’t say anything to Bucky but his look says more than he could put into words anyway. Once he gets closer to the house the rest of the people in attendance of the funeral are all inside, Morgan’s laughter reaches out through the windows and into the air.

 

He doesn’t know where he’s going to go or what he’s going to do. But it doesn’t matter. He survived Siberia, he can survive an American summer on the move. There’s people out the back of the house talking in hushed tones about something, Clint and a few others and Bucky walks past them too. Those are Steve’s people not his, and he doesn’t give a fuck about Steve Rogers in this moment, and it’s clear Steve doesn’t give a fuck about him either. Steve told him that he was over it, that he had made peace with himself or his future or whatever and the first chance he gets he goes back to live a life that wasn’t for him. God forbid he stuck to his promises. God forbid he let Peggy live her life when they’d both seen that video of her talking about her husband. 

 

He kicks the stand of his bike, and laughs under his breath. “ _ ‘To the end of the line.’ _ ” That was the one thing he remembered. The one thing that burrowed itself into his brain that not even Hydra and their scummy claws could latch onto and remove, and now it means nothing because Steve wasn’t there for him when he had the chance to, and he’s not going to be there when he needs him the most. Bucky put himself back under ice on the chance that he would get fixed, all for Steve, and Steve can’t even live a life with him. 

 

He revs the engine as a signatory goodbye and gets the fuck out of there, the dust settling on the driveway behind his wheels serving as the last reminder that he was even there.

**Author's Note:**

> hello yes please comment if this made u sad bcs it made ME SAD while i was writing it.
> 
> (Just 2 clarify, buckys not gone for good, hes not deserting everyone. Hes just. Taking some time away for a while to decompress after everything that happened. mayhaps he'll make some friends while hes gone)


End file.
